How does an indie game go from concept to release, and what does that tell us about what Sony is really like? We speak to the developers behind OlliOlli, Velocity, and The Unfinished Swan to find out...
When talking about the fateful meeting that led to OlliOlli coming to Playstation, Roll7’s Simon Bennett recalls, “We sat down and said, ‘Here’s the stuff we’ve been doing and here’s our pedigree as a business outfit,' and they just really weren’t interested. We showed them a game we’d made for kids with ADHD - no interest there. We showed another thing we’d done previously - again, no interest. Tom [Hegarty, one of Roll7’s founders], seeing that there was no interest said to Shahid [Ahmad, former director of strategic content at SCEE], well, why don’t we show you our skateboarding game?”
It’s a suggestion that would seem to make sense. After all, it was that skateboarding game that got Roll7 the meeting with PlayStation in the first place, after a chance encounter with Futurlab's James Marsden. Roll7 showed him the game at a conference because he ‘‘was wearing skate shoes” and looked like “he might be into skate stuff”. He liked the game, and introduced the studio to Shahid with a simple email that read: “PlayStation, meet Roll7. Roll7, meet PlayStation. FIGHT!”. However. Roll7’s John Ribbins, who had developed what was, at the time, a very basic prototype of the skateboarding videogame, wasn't willing to let Sony see a game that he felt wasn’t yet ready to show.
Fortunately, Hegarty was more wary about letting this opportunity pass them by. "Tom kicked John under the table," Bennett tells us, “like, ‘Show him the f***ing game, dude!' At that point, John finally acquiesced and passed the iPad over to Shahid," Bennett continues. "Shahid disappeared for 30-odd minutes into the game while the conversations continued about other things. Then he turned himself around to the whole table and said, ‘I want this on PlayStation Vita'.”
That anecdote highlights a couple of things about the process of a game from an indie studio finding its way onto PlayStation. Firstly, Sony seems to have an eye for a good idea, even when it's an idea that's yet to be developed to its potential. Secondly, that getting your game on PlayStation may involve a bit of luck.
Indeed, while the aforementioned James Marsden of Futurlab, the studio behind Velocity and Velocity 2X, spent "years making Flash games and corporate websites before I’d reached a level of experience where I thought we were worthy of pitching to PlayStation”, he still feels that there was still a little luck involved along with the hard work when it came to getting a game on console. “There are windows of opportunity that open up for sometimes only weeks or days at a time,” he says. "We were fortunate to have come along with Velocity when one of those windows [happened to be] open.” But Marsden shouldn’t sell himself too short, because if there’s something that his story of getting the attention of Sony reinforces, it’s that idea that Sony is willing to invest in teams that show they have something a little different to offer.
"I knew we had to make an impact,” says Marsden, explaining why he decided §to approach Sony with a bizarre pitch in his first meeting with the publisher. The game Marsden was showing off had heavy ARG (alternate reality game) elements, so he made the pitch itself into something of an ARG, conducting the meeting as if Futurlab was interviewing the PlayStation employees across the table for a job. Futurlab presented the game to senior producer Phil Gaskell after secretly imputing a keycode that, after a certain amount of time had elapsed, popped up with a message saying, "NEW USER DETECTED, PHILLIP GASKELL. UNAUTHORIZED. CHECKING HISTORY," before the game pulled up a load of data the team had nicked from his Linkedln page. “The execs had to excuse themselves from the room for five minutes to discuss what they’d just witnessed," Marsden recalls with a smile. "Then they came back in and the head of the department shook my hand, saying it was one of the finest pitches he'd ever seen.”
The game that was pitched never actually got made, but the take-away from that story is that, just as with Roll7, Sony didn’t really care about the developer's level of experience. What it wanted to see was a cool game: it wanted to see innovative ideas. Show Sony that you have that, or have the potential to produce that, and it seems that it is willing to back you.
Giant Sparrow creative director Ian Dallas found that out when Sony came to him asking about the student project that become The Unfinished Swan. “I just started off making a little prototype as part of a research project I was working on and then I took the festivals," Dallas explains. “I showed it in 2008 - I think it was the very first Sense Of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show. Some people over at Sony saw a YouTube video of the presentation and then sent an email or gave me a call and were interested in talking more.”
It’s interesting to note that even with the project in a state where Dallas himself “didn’t really know what the game was going to be”, Sony could already see the potential in him and his prototype.
“Sony was really early,” says Dallas. “This was when it was just a prototype and they were already saying, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ By GDC of the next year, I was going around to other publishers saying, ‘Hey, anyone else interested?' It wasn’t even close,” he continues. “So not only was Sony the first, it was the most knowledgeable and had the most interest in the game. [For] everybody else, it was a really hard sell to get them interested in this weird unusual thing. I think the closest thing we got was someone going, 'Well, maybe this could work on DS...’”
This gives us an important insight into what Sony looks for in its indies. While it obviously tries to position itself as the home of blockbuster titles, Sony has also actively worked to cultivate an image of PlayStation as a home for games you wouldn't see anywhere else. Sure, to some extent, that’s about marketing. But, when we think of the works of Studio Japan, curios like Vib-Ribbon and Noby Noby Boy, games like Journey and Papa & Yo, and then we hear about Sony actively chasing down odd little indie titles like The Unfinished Swan that are too weird for other publishers, we have to concede that Sony really is on the hunt for original and, occasionally, bizarre games, in a way that other big publishers aren't.
That brings us to another aspect of PlayStation’s image. You may well remember Sony making a lot of fuss about how developer-friendly it is around the release of the PS4, positioning itself as a conduit for creators to realise their visions. But does that really represent what it is actually like to work with Sony behind the scenes? Surely things aren't so open and idyllic as that? Well, according to the developers we spoke to, it actually is.
"We decided that all the content in the game you had to skate over wouldn't be procedurally generated by your own music library, which was one of our original ideas," said Bennett. "When we went and justified why that wouldn't be there, John explained it over 20 minutes, and Shahid said afterwards, ‘Yeah, I don't really care, I just wanted to see how long you would try and justify it for.’ That’s when he said, 'Look, guys, this is your game. You make the decisions that are right for you.’ That was a really big moment for us," Bennett continues, “where we went: ‘Oh, okay then, we can do what we want!"’
Dallas has had a similar experience with Sony, describing PlayStation as being “extremely hands-off" from a creative standpoint. “Sometimes we’ll come with questions and we’ll say. This isn't really working right, we’ve got a couple of options, what do you feel would be a good approach?"’ Dallas says. “But we’ve never had situations where Sony was dictating anything.”
That even extended to times when Giant Sparrow failed to meet the milestones that it had agreed to hit in its contract with Sony. “With any game, it’s hard to decide before you really know much about the game what you’re going to be doing six months from now and contractually agree to that,” Dallas explains. "We came up with something that was originally about a year and a half for development and I think maxed out at five people. The game eventually ended up taking closer to three years and 14 people at the end of it. It diverged pretty severely and about a year into development, when we were ostensibly meant to be done, it was kind of obvious we weren’t going to make the deadline. We were working on something very different from the paint splatting - a lot of it was the vine-growing mechanic, which ended up shipping, but for a long time we didn’t really know what it was going to be and we were lost a bit," Dallas continues. "I had a meeting with the head of Sony Santa Monica and she basically said: This is not what we expected, but it looks really interesting, so please just keep doing what you’re doing.' It was very encouraging. That was one of the big reasons we decided to work with Sony. It felt like it understood what it was getting in to and the messiness of working on something that isn’t like any other games that were out there."
It’s great to hear that Sony gives its developers that kind of creative freedom, but we also wanted to know more about the ways in which Sony does get involved to make a game better on the journey from conception to release. Bennett gave us an example of the huge difference working with PlayStation can make for a small indie developer, telling us that OlliOlli would have been a very different (and probably not very fun) game, were it not for Sony.
"At first-playable we took them a basic prototype and they had their testers come and play it and that was absolutely crucial,” Bennett explains. Up until that point, OlliOlli was a far more brutal game that would only accepting perfect landings, but when we saw that one Sony playtester was totally incapable of playing it - he couldn’t land perfectly once - Roll7 realised things needed to change.
“It was this realisation that maybe there needs to be some granularity to the landing system - that came directly from meeting them,” says Bennett. “I think that’s the first time we started to get that idea of humility. The idea that no feature, or control, or mechanic that we’re using is complete until someone can just pick it up and get the hang of it in an appropriate amount of time and that's when we started going really heavy on testing. PlayStation started that for us," Bennett continues. “I think we got about a hundred people in for OlliOlli over the period of development. It was that constant iteration. We realised that without that, we would likely make a game that is either too hard, or just too abstracted for people to actually pick up and play comfortably."
For Dallas and Giant Sparrow, the most important aspect of working with Sony is that it gave them the financial security and infrastructural support to “focus on making the game” that the team had envisioned (though it’s worth noting that doesn’t reflect the experience of all developers - Roll7 was taking a big financial risk when it made OlliOlli and Futurlab had to use the cash from its Velocity PS Plus deal to finish its game).
Dallas told us that Giant Sparrow could have made a version of the game without Sony - it was offered funding from the Integrated Grant Fund, for example - but it wouldn’t have been the game they wanted to make. “We’re trying to do something that is unusual, but relatively accessible and that feels luxurious. There’s a point where it needs a certain level of production value in order to get across that feeling. I think similarly, with our next game, Edith Finch, making something that feels like classy horror requires a certain production value in order to get across. If you’re working with a very small number of people, it’s in danger of becoming something like Blair Witch, which is cool, but that isn’t what we were doing. The game just wouldn't be possible without a certain investment on the part of Sony."
Lest we think that things are always smooth when working with a big company like Sony, it’s worth bearing in mind that things don’t always go as planned. Futurlab reveals that the first thing it did for Sony was working on an ARG component of Heavy Rain that was meant to create interest in the lead-up to the game's release. Unfortunately, the project was cancelled after nine months. “We’ve had as many false starts as we have successes," Marsden admits.
As far as we’re concerned, the excellent Velocity games prove things worked out for Futurlab in the end, but we were curious about what Sony’s reaction was to the games was and how it measured success: is it about quality, or is it about sales?
"At this level, with a small team and a relatively low financial risk, it’s all about whether the game is good or not,” says Marsden. “We have had lots of support from PlayStation over the last few years, and it’s been in the interest of getting good games onto its PlayStation platforms - that's the sole purpose.”
When we ask Bennett about Sony’s reaction to OlliOlli when Roll7 submitted the final version of the game and were preparing for release, we get a similar impression of how the publisher measures its own success.
“This shows what experience they have and what they know: they were all really confident." Bennett tells us. “They were like. This game is great, we love it.' We just thought that was classic, you know... our producer and marketing guys just saying that because that’s what they say. We did a debrief meeting and our expectations were that the game was going to totally bomb and that this was the end of the studio - I’m not overstating that. When the scores came out, all of us were so confused,” he continues. “But PlayStation was super hyped about the game to the end, to the point that it signed OlliOlli2 before OlliOlli had been released. At the time we thought it must be mental. Why wouldn’t you just wait until [OlliOlli] came out? I think from their perspective - and this is why we love PlayStation - they saw that it would be a long time before we saw any money from the game and that we were delivering. It was about keeping our studio afloat and focused on our next IP to build this thing OlliOlli and it's been awesome."
Perhaps there are developers out there who have had far worse experiences with Sony. Perhaps the company is far more draconian when it comes to bigger budget titles. Or perhaps Sony really is just that open and helpful with indie teams. All we can say is that the stories of these developers who have traveled the road to PlayStation paints a picture of Sony as a company that is remarkably similar to the one that its marketing machine has tried to make us envision in our minds - that is, as a company that puts the power of creativity in the hands of creators.
In that respect, while Sony deserves credit for spotting and supporting people with good ideas, the experience of these developers proves that the road to PlayStation is really about the developers themselves. Sure, Sony provides support where its needed - bringing Giant Sparrow into Sony Santa Monica and funding its work; changing Roll7’s perspective by giving it access to testers; giving Futurlab a deal that let it get over the line developing Velocity - but it is up to the creators to deliver the quality games everyone wants to see at the end of the process.
Marsden sums this notion up nicely: "The best thing Sony does is get out of the way of the creative process. Having the support to make something like Velocity 2X - even having the belief in the initial idea - is all you can really ask from a platform holder or publisher."
And when a small developer is given that freedom to create, when it completes that journey to PlayStation, it really can make them. "Until Velocity 2X, we had to do the calling around, but after Velocity 2X, we’ve been getting calls from the biggest players in the industry,” says Marsden. "All because Sony gave us the freedom.”